35 :

My breath crystallised the moment it left my mouth. I was hunched down on my knees. My body wracked with bruises from where unseen boots had connected with my ribs.

It looked as if I was praying to a God made out of blood.

I spit blood out and it slopped slowly in thick lumps onto cold, wet concrete. Above me I was dimly aware of rain splashing against my hair. Hair that was thickened and matted with blood. Rain that felt like a shower, but somehow, it wasn’t the main thing on my mind. Nor the mud on my knees or the damp, heavy wetness of rain as it slipped off my coat.

In the moonlight my blood looked like a thick black pool that was growing over the ground like a weed. That was the main thing on my mind. Exactly how much blood did I have left?

I gasped and tried to catch a breath out of my mouth. It came in gulps – a haemorrage of oxygen. My bones ached. I fumbled for air. My lungs grasped for even an extra cell of air.

It does get worse, you know.

An unseen hand yanked my head up to face someone’s crotch. Yanked my head by the hair. Felt like they pulled out clumps of it from the root with the violence of the thrust. Imagine if God herself had kicked you in the balls.

Fucking fuck. You’d have to invent new words to describe how it felt. Like someone was pulling the skin off your skull. An operation without anasthetic. Every fifteen minutes someone wakes up during an operation. Every fifteen minutes they come to, paralysed, unable to open their eyes, their mouths, to move, and yet fully awake. They feel every naunce of the scalpel.

And involuntarily, I swore. FUCK!

Next thing I was aware of was the sharp, stunned sting of flesh against flesh. Someone had slapped me. And not just gently, but as hard and fast as a hand could move. My teeth flapped inside my mouth like the limp hand of a dead man moves when kicked by a victorious soldier. My fillings rattled inside their cases. I was coming undone. The inside of my mouth was torn with the outline of my teeth as they impacted against sullen, slow flesh. I drew blood again.

It tasted warm. Salty. Rich, like a milkshake. Some vague trace of bile leapt up my throat as I swallowed my own blood. I swallowed a small globule of stomach acid, bile, and vomit. Fuck. I needed a drink. I need water.

The aluminium taste of fear filled my mouth again. A nugget of acrid, hot bile came back into my mouth. It stung against the wound. A reflex. I spat it out, landed on the cold, wet concrete. It glistened on concrete. In a few minutes it would dry and be brittle, like dust.

Amazing isn’t it, the things you notice at times like these?

Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. The lengths human imagination can reach. Not quite as far as my nerve endings. I felt as if it was impossible to feel any more fucking pain. I felt as if I was having glass rammed into every pore of my skin. As if my skin was being torn apart by someone with their bare fucking hands. As if I was an experiment to see how much pain a man may take – and then see if he can take that any further. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had, and I hurt more than I ever thought I could.

It was like I was a kneeling experiment. How much pain can a man take before he blacks out? Is it sfae? IS IT SAFE?

And I was thinking this is it, this is the end, I’m going to die like this and no one will fucking know where or when or how, only that at sometime in the future someone will find me dead. MAKE IT STOP.

Maybe even death was better than this. A voice spoke. Deeper than the sea, sharp, as a hunting knife.

“Shut Up. You Dumb Fuck!”

I tried to place that voice. Who was it? I knew it, but from where?

And I knew and didn’t want to know the answer to that question at the same time.

God looked down from thousands of miles above and remained mute as I asked him why me? He never had any answers. God rolled dice and asked a question. And the Eight-Ball said ‘don’t count on it.’ The Devil smiled. He would win this bet.

“Didn’t your mother teach you not to swear you fuck? Not to spit in public?”

What do you do in this time, in this place? Our natural response is to bow and kowtow to authority – to agree with anything that might be more powerful that we are. In the hope that it will be merciful. In the hope that it will show some hitherto hidden act of kindness.

Sure, people can say they’d rather die on their feet than live on their knees. But right now I’d rather spend a thousand years in slavery to the God That Did Not Kill me than another second living on my feet in this way.

The scared. The weak. They bow to events and try and slip through it, like a reed that bends in the wind.

I am the reed, but the brittle thing that breaks before it bends. I am the scared. The weak.

But even in the smallest fire, the weakest flame, there is still a spark. A spark of resistance.

I wanted to disappear off the face of the planet. Be anywhere but here. But instead I swallowed my own puke, and choked.

“Yes, sir.”

The natural reaction. Politeness. Humility. It’s how us fucking English are trained. Please, sir, thank you.

Another slap. Another perforation of the skin inside my mouth. This time it felt colder. Harder. In the distance I could see a brick wall. A hole where a door used to be. Some cracked glass. I was inside a building. An abandoned one. I was empty. And alone.

“Good! Mummy’s little boy is learning some FUCKING MANNERS!”

Laughter. A wave of laughter that came around the several anonymous bodies around me. This fucking world, that teaches kids that other people are just things, objects to be manipulated and used in their quest to survival. One religion, one creed, amongst these evil fucks. Kill Or Be Killed.

I don’t blame video games, or violent movies, or dead rappers. I blame their own boneheaded stupidity. Ain’t no cure for being dumb.

Rain. Drip drop, drip drop, was falling onto the ground behind those steel capped boots. I wanted to see who they belonged to, so I moved my neck. I caught a glimpse of a red sheet of brick and two white pillars in shadow. Which wasn’t far.

The breath left my body faster than a soul exits the body.

Up above, the Devil smiled - I was starting to doubt the existence of God, his betting partner. Job still believed in the face of everything. But I didn’t. And that meant the Devil was winning. Evil was that which disproved our faith and crushed our belief. Not just in God, but in all good things.

What use is an omnipotent God if he never does anything, never says anything, never offers any proof of his existence? You might as well believe in the existence of the Tooth Fairy or an 80-foot Santa. An deaf, dumb and blind God that never explains isn’t even a statue. At least you can see a statue. At least you know it’s there. I don’t believe in God.

But I believe that the steel toe capped boot that just impacted my bollocks is far far too fucking real. I collapsed onto the concrete, as empty as a burst balloon. I was losing my will to live, if this is what life is. I was losing my will to anything except wanting to be somewhere – anywhere - else.

You don’t even know how much pain the body can produce until you try really hard. The scars you cannot see that run the deepest. The worst type of pain is that which cannot be healed by pill and scalpel.

Fuck. Shit.

Sure. All perception consists of synapses and electrical signals in the brain. And this could just be a blown fuse, some overloaded circuit in my brain. But it isn’t.

Was it a boot? Or was it a gun? I have no idea. But I never, never, want to feel like that again. I was gasping for breath like a diver running out of air. I felt as if I was drowning in the air, like a fish.

The room seemed to be spinning ; as if I was drunk. But I wasn’t. Sure, I’d had a drink or two earlier. But not enough to do this to me. I felt… disorientated. Disconnected from the world around me. As if I wasn’t here. That this wasn’t happening.

I was retreating inside myself to a place without sorrow, or pain, or any form of feeling. Somewhere inside me where the world could never get. As distant from the here and now as a star in the night.

But I’d never felt more sober. More alive. More aware. And it wasn’t a room. Rooms have a roof. But there was no roof. That’s why it was raining in here.

How did I get here? I remember walking home on the last tube. I remember the sound of a car driving behind me. Then pain. Something very hard, and collapsing on concrete in a back alley. A grunt, a shout, a jolt of surprise. In a half-conscious state, I remember being strung up and a something being pulled over my face. I dimly remember being bundled into the boot of a car, carried like a corpse, and shifting around in the boot. Seconds like hours. Minutes that felt like years.

I don’t remember those things anymore. At the time I knew it was happening, but it felt like a dream. Like it wasn’t really happening. It faded like a dream. I can only piece it together. I can’t imagine how else it could’ve happened.I presume I’d been knocked cold. I didn’t feel my body collapsing onto the concrete of the car park. But I filled in the gaps. There was no other explanation.

I was jarred awake inside the boot of a car by the rocking of the wheels on tarmac. By the loud guttural buzz of the engine ticking over. By the fumes and roar of a bus parked inches from my head at traffic lights. My legs cramped as they’d been bent back double inside. Blood swollen in the veins.

My first reaction was to open my eyes. Pitch black. I couldn’t identify the noise. It sounded like a car. My leg muscles weakened and cramped. Spasmed like a fit, kicking like the last jerk of muscles slipping into seat. And instinctively I tried to sit up.

And – shit.

Smacked my head against steel. A second bruise rose like an angry fist and my head pounded. Pain. Pain is really fucking pointless. It made its point, yet continues to ram it home. At this point, anaesthetic is now my religion. I believe in it’s power to correct everything.

Human beings are fucking stupid. I acted on instinct. Instinct knows nothing and is below thought. In the year I met my true love a man I only met once tried to kill me.

Involuntarily, unthinking, I shouted in pain and swore under my breath.

There was nothing I could do. There are times when our options are so limited that there is no choice. Our impotence, our powerlessness, our insignificance in the enormous world, is the only factor.

All I could do was wait to be shot in the back like a bad Mafia movie. This is how they do it. Dragged into an open grave and opened at the back with a bullet. I tried to stay awake. I started counting, but always lost count. I tried to follow the route the car took, left, right, two seconds and then I lost count, wait, traffic lights, fumes of a diesel tanker behind me, it’s engine growling in fear and distrust. The car turning left, stopping. The engine ticking over. A door opening. Some laughing. Something opening. The creak of an unoiled hinge. A slow drive on gravel.

And I was born again in rain and darkness.

I squinted, trying to adjust to this gloom. I couldn’t see much ; traces of outlines. Murmurs of voices. I remember being thrown out onto concrete from an idling car. I remember numbly trying to stand up, stumbling and running, my muscles weakened, my blood haemorrhaging in my veins after the dull, relentless cramp of the steel box I had been prisoner of. A car revved its engines behind my stumbling form. I tried to take this fucking beanie hat off so I could see. My hands were tied with industrial strength black gaffa tape. I stumbled. My ankles were still feeling the novelty of blood running through them. At least I could feel.

I stumbled and fell over. Instinct, stupid instinct tried to put my hands out to cushion the fall but I couldn’t. Tried to right myself but I couldn’t use my hands. I remember the dull welt of skin scraping off my palms. So I stumbled on knees when I heard footsteps running on gravel and a rushing of air near me. A boot connected with me. I collapsed like a burst balloon.

Behind me, someone laughed. And I heard that voice again.

“Shut Up!”

And a whisper. Sullen, young, chastised. Like a naughty pup or a scared animal. But that laughter belonged to someone. Someone who wasn’t very old, who was seeing, tasting their first mouthful of power through violence and fear, voice trembling with adrenalin.

“Yes, boss.”

I heard the steel toe-capped boots crouch in the rain. It was difficult to see as I was crying in fear, my eyes trying to decipher the stream of liquid from a sudden sense of jittery hyperawareness. Nobody could see in the rain but me, what a coward I was. Common sense told me that right now the one thing I should NOT do is try to fight back, because I know, I know, as sure as a Catholic believes in God, that I would lose. But is it better to fight and lose than plea for leniency and pray?

My hands were still gaffa-taped around my back. But whomever this was, they seemed keen on a fair fight. The hat that had been stretched over my face was yanked off.

And this was where we came in.

Something was pulling my hair. Holding my chin inches from the ground. Something was going into my mouth. Something cold, something wet, something steel. I could see the gun barrel as a blur, as it was far too near for my eyes to focus upon in anything but the most ill-defined of shapes. Behind this I could see a dark coat, and something stretching into the sky.

I’m going to die. I’ll never see Helen again. I’ll never get out of here alive. Whatever it is, whoever it is, I’ve seen too much.

Him. That’s where I heard that voice before. A tiny little fuck at the end of a mobile phone call.

And God – with the power to kill in his hand – was asking me a question. His voice adrenalised with excitement and with some demented form of justice in his veins.

“Who’s history now, bitch?”

I couldn’t talk in anything but vowels. But I think I said something like “yewar”. If you’re going to go down, die on your feet, not on your knees. But I was on my knees. Meekly going down, my spirit bruised but stupidly, defiantly resisting. Custers Last, Vain Stand, and nobody could see it but me, these fucks, and a God that couldn’t even care about anyone.

But I knew that they would never destroy the purity inside me. NEVER. A pure corpse. What a fat lot of fucking good I was going to be. I still had a lot of phone calls to make. I still had to make things up to my brother. I haven’t spoken to him in 28 months.

Stupid little bastard should never have stood us all up at his own wedding ceremony.

Someone giggled. The gun felt cold in my mouth. I wondered if it was sterile. You think the stupidest things sometimes. The metal connected with my fillings; a frozen chill shot through me. I shivered. A thousand feet walked over my grave. Though I could the feet I could dimly see. Myself including, only ten feet were due to walk over this grave, two of them being mine.

This time his voice was lower, directed away from me. Calm in the manner that only the truly furious can provide.

“Shut The Fuck Up.”

“Y-“

“DID YOU HEAR ME? I said SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

And with this kind of controlled anger, this coiled, vile poison in his heart, I knew there and then that I had seen my last sunrise, kissed my last girl, made my last love, and now I was going to meet whatever came after death. Whatever that was.

No one gets out of here alive. No one gets off this earth alive either. There’s only one way off. The box.

Not the abstract knowledge of death we all carry, that one day we will no longer be here, but the sudden finality of death as the here and now. Today.

“So…..” his voice uncoiled, in a moment he had no doubt rehearsed. “You little shit. Are you enjoying my wife?”

What the fuck?

I tried to answer him, but again, it was difficult to talk. “Shenotyerwif” I said. Well. I thought I said that. What it actually sounded like was shntyrwef.

A gloved hand stroked my hair. It spoke.

“Tut tut.” He smiled, the smile of the doomed, like the face one sees when one knows he is about to die. “You were doing so well, until you started lying to me.”

I could make out the line of his face from the moonlight, I cold make out - just - some of it - in shilouette. And this wasn’t the last face I wanted to see.

He leant down, whispered in my ear. I was prone, gaffataped at the wrist, with a gun in my mouth. My hands behind my back. And he whispered.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a lie. A lie poisons the world around it. It infects us with deception, and teaches us to live our lives without virtue. It insults me, because you think you’re smarter than me. It insults you, because you think you can fool and mislead me.”

His voice never rose above a whisper.

“We married six years ago on May 26th. She’s never divorced me – and I’ll never divorce her.” He said. “And you are a fucking liar.”

Shit.

If I could speak, I’m sure I’d mention the Five Years Separation Without Consent rule. But I could neither speak nor think. I could only feel, react, respond. A reflex. A jerk.

“Because true love is forever. Let no man put asunder what God hath put together. Til death us do part. Remember that when your hands paw my wife. Remember that when your lips invade her mouth. True love is forever. And I will always be there for her. Always.”

I choked on the gun in my mouth. Saliva dripped down the barrel. A finger tensed on the trigger. The hand moved imperceptibly. The rest of the body was doing something I could not see. The gun lifted up in my mouth, and I strained my neck to follow it’s angle. I could see him. An ordinary looking man, but with eyes as blue as the sky, as cold as winter. And scars that glinted in the moonlight. He wasn’t very tall either. A small yapping dog in shoes.

I think I get the message.

“Longer than you. Not just for an hour, or a day, or a month, you little shit. But forever.”

I will never be able to forget that face for as long as I live. Or the twin chimneys of the derelict power station in Battersea that towered dimly above him.

About thirty two minutes then.

I’m going to die here, and the witnesses to my death are going to emaciated foxes, insects, and this handful of evil fucks. Even the cameras don’t see this far.


Hands roughly ripped the gaffa tape from my wrists, pulling hairs out by the root. I swore again. Involuntarily, by instinct. FUCK!

In an instant the barrel was out of my mouth, and the steel butt had rapped my cheek again. I felt a tooth dislodge, grow loose inside my jaw. My tongue ran over the tooth.

“Now now flyboy. Run home and go back to her. But if you’re still with her in twenty four hours, you’re history.” He turned away and walked back to the car, with its engine running, a dull prosaic vehicle, the banality of evil. Behind him, his goons followed at a distance. They stood, watching, some idly talking, small murmurs, puffing on soggy fags shielded by stubby fingers. The one of them that was sat in the car revved the engine.

I choked trying to get my breath. I was alive. ALIVE. No-one could take that away from me.

But they could, and ten seconds ago they very nearly did. It’s only when we face death that we feel most alive. When death has been cheated, evaded, risked and evaded, that some feel alive. But I felt truly alive in Helen’s arms. Her husband stopped, turned, and faced me. He said one thing – one thing I could never forget.

“Oh, and remember this, fuckface.” Voices echo in open spaces. Bounce off buildings like radar signals. “I’m only warning you because you don‘t know who you‘re fucking with. Most people don’t even get that. I’ll be watching. I know where you live.”

He got into the front passenger seat. The car door slammed, the reverberation of the sound echoing around this wasteland.

I was free. My hands burning with the raw, exposed skin. My hair stinging, the clumps of ripped out roots hanging uselessly in the wind. But somehow, somewhy, I had been spared.

Air stung my skin. A bruise was riding like an angry sun on my skin. Knelt forward, my prone body unfurled. My eyes blinking to adjust to the ambient, background light, my fingers uncurling as if some arthritis had just been reversed.

The engine roared somewhere behind me. The wheels spinning on the dirt track.
The noise getting louder. Two thin streaks of light illuminated the land around me. The patches of grey concrete, the clumps of unkempt grass and overgrown weeds. The stains and graffiti left by the young and dispossessed.

Instead of my life flashing before me, I saw concrete.

In some kind of primal instinct, some unthinking moment, I ran. I pulled my cramped, distended muscles and in a moment of pure, desperate adrenalin, I ran.

The nearest I had come to exercise before was running for the train. Jesus, my muscles hurt.

Something touched me. My knees buckled, my body bent, curved. The roaring got louder. My body rotated, my knees bent, my spine impacting against glass, my legs thrown up, my neck leaning forward, my head rotating on its axis, my body crashing against the roof with the dull thud of an old episode of Starsky & Hutch, my body crucified upon steel and pain. I was Jesus, the Devil, I was a voodoo doll, I was all these things. I was the prince of pain. My body exploded with a thousand cold needles of terror. My muscles tensed, relaxed, a stream of urine shot out of me in a dark patch on my crotch.

For a moment I was weightless. I was an astronaut. I was Buzz Aldrin. There’s no air here.

As if I were some urban ballerina, watched by none, I could fly. I felt something crumpled, something crunch. For a fraction of a second, hung in space, my body turning through the arc, the car accelerated on, before I could see, shooting away, two red streaks of light.

My body crumpled. Cracked. I felt something break, somewhere.

A screech of brakes. An engine revving, gears crunching, tyres spinning backwards. Four large weights shot over me. My ribs cracked, collapsed, my insides, I could feel them being rearranged. I could feel my lung burst like someone had trodden on a bug. For a fraction of a second, I could fly.

Four large weights drove over me from the other direction. Splinters of white bone were fired across my body, penetrating my lungs in a thousand small shards. My lungs, gasping, haemorrhaging for air, began to slowly fill with something that condensed and turned black when exposed to oxygen.

I was drowning in my own blood. I gasped for air.

The world went black at the edges. To the centre of everything .Then everything went white from the edges. Like snow.